Tag: audio

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made a couple of stable builds with the version 2.0.3. The first one of those was made a bit early as I was about to leave for a trip abroad, and mainly included one bug fix for Hexen related to saving and restoring object state from save files. Recently I’ve made a couple of additional stable builds to investigate and fix a problem with the Ubuntu Launchpad build scripts, where the “doomsday-stable” packages were correctly built but nothing was actually included in the generated DEB packages.

On the whole, progress has been somewhat slow. Perhaps the biggest advance was in the dengine.net website backend, where I’ve now split the API functionality to a separate api.dengine.net server, so that things like master server and update queries won’t interfere with the normal operation of the project home page and forums. I hope this will alleviate the issue of dengine.net sometimes failing to respond to requests.

Prompted by a forum post, over the weekend I was investigating an audio volume issue on Windows. It turns out there is a problem with the SDL_mixer music volume controls. I have yet to determine if there is a workaround that Doomsday can do to avoid the issue. Such a workaround would be preferable to disabling SDL_mixer music on Windows completely, since SDL_mixer does bring value to the table (e.g., music formats). The situation is also slightly tricky because SDL and SDL_mixer are built in to the engine, so there isn’t a plugin to take out or something simple like that.

Last week I went on a brief modding tangent and added a plugin that loads UDMF maps.

UDMF is an attractive choice for map editing due to its flexibility and potential to be widely compatible with map editors and source ports. However, it is basically only a syntax for describing map data; the real trick is interpreting the contents and supporting all the required gameplay logic, line and sector specials, etc. Doomsday at the moment supports only vanilla maps with a couple of Boom features. The new UDMF plugin also doesn’t yet transfer all the data to Doomsday, for example most line flags are ignored.

When it comes to extending Doomsday’s support for modding, I view full Boom compatibility as the first milestone to reach. Modding is on the roadmap for the future 2.4 release, so in the near future the UDMF importer plugin remains an experimental feature.